htaccess and Maintenance Mode plug in

Hi,

I have installed 2 websites (1 French, 1 English) on same host as subdomains with their own databases. I currently have the plugin Maintenance Mode (https://sw-guide.de/wordpress/plugins/maintenance-mode/) activated on both. On the French site everything is fine but on the English site I cannot view pages while in “maintenance mode”. I can when it is deactivated.

It seems it has to do with the permalinks because when I go there the dialogue box “If your .htaccess file were writable, we could do this automatically…” is visible on the bottom and is not on the French site. I edited the htaccess file through my ftp client and replaced the code with the code suggested within WP (which was exactly the same anyway). Thoughts?

Thanks.